


Radio Silence

by anneapocalypse



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Past Relationship(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rating May Change, Rescue, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-04-27 14:51:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5052940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carolina's lost years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Signal Lost

**Author's Note:**

> **A Note on Categories & Ships**:
> 
> This fic is primarily meant to be a gap-filler--not one continuous arc, but a series of vignettes over the span of Carolina's lost time between the cliff and her eventual return. Along the way several ships are touched upon, both past and present. In my mind, it's not really possible to separate the experiences of Carolina's lost years from the relationships she had, and the losses of them. Some of these vignettes will skew much more toward genfic; some will allude to past ships; a few will be more explicitly shippy. I've tried to tag as accurately as possible and apologize for any nebulousness!
> 
> For those who'd like to know, the specifics of the ships are as follows:
> 
>   * Carolina/York as a past, one-time hook-up.
>   * Carolina/Niner as a past friends-with-benefits relationship.
>   * Carolina/Maine as a more long-term past relationship.
> 

> 
> This fic does take place in the same continuity as [The Drop](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3432716/chapters/7523573), but you don't need to have read that to read this. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, and your feedback is always appreciated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited 9/12/16.

When she woke in Recovery the first thing she remembered was the dreams.

She had dreamed of her mother, of strong hands tossing her high in the air, the double french braids swinging against her mother’s shoulders. Her laugh. Somewhere close her father's strong southern drawl was saying _Take it easy_ and her mother's laughter turned to a snort, _She's a little girl, Leonard, she’s not made of glass_ and she lifted her arms over her head, squealing with delight, and felt proud. She loved the sensation of flying up into the air, the thrill in the pit of her stomach when she started to fall—

only her mother’s hands didn’t catch her, and she kept falling.

She hit the ground running, running, like she’d been running forever and she could never stop and she tasted metal in her mouth, something was chasing her as she clawed her way to waking in frantic gasps, her eyes burst open under the fluorescent lights, and for moment she was blinded.

Then they came forward.

_Carolina. Carolina._

 

_Carolina!_

The snow is thick in the sky and visual is hell, she can’t see where Tex landed, and her red marker on the HUD is all the way over near the half-buried bow of the ship. (How? They were practically on top of each other right before the impact and then—)

Carolina struggles for the breath the impact knocked out of her, trying to roll over in the deep snow. It’s dry, powdery, sticking to her gloves.

_Where are we?_

Doesn’t matter. Find Tex.  

Her marker is moving again, and there’s another, moving toward her, a friendly. Barely there in visual, white on white on white.

He shoulders his weapon when he sees her.

He gets close before Iota whispers, _Something’s wrong—_

 

They almost had it, too.

Sure, she hadn’t trained, they were brand new to her and they were all running on pure instinct but instinct can be enough sometimes, whether it’s the kind instilled in you from years of early-morning drill sirens or the kind you’re born with—instinct can save you.

And it would have. In that fraction of a second before the Director appeared against the glass, they had synced in a perfect sunburst of bright energy, and she had felt the pulse of it in all her limbs, the armor enhancements ready to engage, and she had it, she was going to _win_.

And he fucking ruined it, and she can’t help thinking he did it on purpose.

 _No no no don’t don’t we had it I had her,_ Eta was howling, and Iota the bright wisp of a voice skirting at the edge of her consciousness whispered sadly, _He ruins everything._

 

The sun glares in her eyes off the domed faceplate of Maine’s helmet. She scrambles, trying to get to her feet and get a clearer view as his long strides close the distance between them. Heavy footfalls in the snow, _too fast—_

A big hand sweeps her up into the air, and her breath almost stops in her throat.

There’s no tilt of his helmet, no question, nothing in his movement or his stance that speaks to her, it’s like he’s not even looking at her. Like it’s not her, like it’s not him.

The gold helmet gleams, haloed in the falling snow, and everything feels frozen, distant. It’s someone else struggling in the air, clawing at the iron grip around her throat, it isn’t her and it isn’t Maine because Maine would never do this.

Tex _would_ go rogue, York _would_ get some stupid chivalric idea in his head, but _Maine_.

 

Afterwards she tried and tried to get it back.

She could never really be sure of the neural depth, with the two of them. Could only focus on one at a time and the constant switch, it was like having no peripheral vision, sometimes, having to keep turning your head. Soon as she had a lock on one, the other was gone. Catch it, the first had slipped loose. And sometimes—she could only describe it as _chasing,_ they’d chase each other, carving circles in her consciousness until she dropped dizzily to her knees clutching her helmet, begging them to slow down, please.

They were so fast, so fast she could feel them chasing circles in her exhausted consciousness even when she lay down to sleep. _Please don’t pull us, we’ll be quiet_ , Eta would whisper. And they would retreat to the edge, curled at the base of her skull, but even there she could feel them trembling, spinning idly, never at rest.

So why couldn’t they put that to work on the training floor? Why couldn’t they _get_ it?

Since she woke up the second time she'd done almost nothing but train, since she walked out of medical ignoring the doctor’s protests, _"You've been unconscious for four days, Agent, I absolutely cannot allow you to—"_ but she did anyway because she had to make it work, she _had_ to, pull them together as three, get them in sync and make them move together.

She tried and tried and for a few brief moments it worked, but it wasn’t enough, they were still at odds, not fast enough, not quite in sync with her or with each other.

A burst of images would spill through her mind like a book dropped open. Boarding school. Drills. Oh-four-hundred, or oh-three, or oh-two if your squad's performance had been exceptionally poor, which hers never was. Siren screams. Up and out of bed, suit up, arm up, fall in line and snap to attention. Belke! Look alive! Try and stay that way! Carringer, you're already dead! Miles! You want to drop to Bravo? Ten-SHUN!

(You do this over and over until everything is pure muscle memory and instinct so that one day instinct will save your ass, so it will move you when all else fails.)

Squad Leader Church, report!

Sir!

Eta, can we focus?

_Sure, Carolina._

Never could tell when Eta was going to be on or off. She wanted to yell at them, sometimes, fumbling like sloppy cadets. Wasn’t she their leader, weren’t they essentially a squad of three? But nothing was instinct anymore and their training wasn’t enough, was never enough.

She hadn’t understood that she’d feel them not just in her head but the currents of them all through her body like electricity, that they’d carve a circuit path inside her skull, chasing each other just out of sync and it would never stop, that her skin would crackle with the tension until she wanted to tear herself apart to quiet it.

She never trained for this.

Eta, I need you with me. Eta! He’d go cold and sullen, and it hurt, the way it came without warning or reason.

I need you to sync. Okay? Let's try it again. Eta, you take speed, Iota, you take camo. Fifteen second burst, okay? That's all we need.

Iota flickered with uncertainty.

You can do this. Eta, you first, okay? Give her the jumpstart?

 _Got it_.

Go.

Eta sparked off first. Running, chasing, Eta could do that. Carolina felt the push not just in the movement of the suit, not just in the adrenaline cocktail burning in her veins but something at the core of her—a pull, an urgency, almost a helplessness. The image of the briefcase on the freeway flashed through her head, the roar in her ears as the unit spun up and her feet turned to fire.

It was a nanosecond difference but Eta was first and sparked off Iota like a pilot light, and _there_ , there it was—Iota poured into every chromatomorphic plate of her armor. Not cloaking, but the idea was similar—analyzing the visual on either side, modulating the color of the plating second by second to match—and at this speed, she was close to invisible. Like light passed through her body, and it almost felt like that, the way Iota lit up in her mind, glowing with pride.

When she ran, she could disappear too. Like Tex.

 

The HUD blinks dark as the helmet goes, and the cold wind snaps against her face, snow stinging her eyes. The hand on the back of her neck is coldly gentle in a way that’s nothing like Maine’s usual touch, his fingers in her hair, the pause and the eyebrow raised, waiting for her okay.

“What are you _doing?_ ” and her voice growls raw and drowns in the wind howling at her ears.

Then it all reds out and a flood of images crashes into her, _long twisting corridors, a siren scream, a howl of grief_ , she thinks she’s screaming and she can’t _see,_ what’s happening—

_Wait!_

The two voices twine perfectly into one, cry her name.

There’s a tearing feeling in a her skull, inside and out, and then black.

 

_(You’re already dead.)_

 

_Carolina!_

She’s aware of the impulse, a flicker of yellow light down her spine and the hand going to her hip for the grappling rig, locking it into her armor with her free hand as she falls and falls and everything slows down.

Or maybe it’s just a very long fall.

Her eyes narrow in the burning cold, honing in on imperfections in the ice wall, a gap to snag. She sees it down a long tunnel of light with perfect clarity, like it was put there just for her.

Pure instinct, muscle memory, saves her. It’s enough.

She’s trained for this. The signal left behind just sparks it off, sets her moving before she’s able to think. Iota’s gone, Eta’s gone, the space where they were cold and hollow in her head, but they left something behind.

_We’re sorry._

The line catches and she jerks to a hard stop in midair and swings back, and the ice wall comes up fast.

 


	2. Ice Wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carolina is nothing if not a survivor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a total rewrite of a short fic I wrote a few years ago. You can find the original [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/770885/chapters/1453291), if you're really curious! It was one of the first Carolina fics I ever wrote.
> 
> Warning for descriptions of injury and blood. Briefly references a relationship between Carolina and Maine.

When she comes to, her face is burning.

She can move her hands—her right hand stiff, aching like she’s been gripping something very tightly. She’s not freezing. Her armor’s temp-controlled. But her head is exposed. She clutches at her face without thinking, only air where her helmet should be, and rough scrape of icy gloves on windburned skin is agony, drawing a hoarse scream from her throat. She wheezes, chokes and coughs on dry, cold air.

Cold numbs pain, you’d think. Think it would ease the pounding in her head, but no.

She sways. Gasps. Clutches for the line.

Looks up.

The hook’s caught some twenty or thirty meters up. The snow has stopped falling, but her eyes still sting. She has no HUD. No damage reports for her armor, no environmental analytics, no area map, no targets marked in red, no objective marked in yellow. No AIs to run her armor mods. Not that those would do much good here.

And she's bleeding her body heat out through her head. The suit’s working overtime to maintain a safe temperature at her core, but her blood’s fighting the cold where it pumps above the neck, fighting frostbite on her skin, keeping her brain humming.

(There is a sliver of something needling in the space the AIs left. But can’t think about that now. Have to get out of the cold.)

Bleeding—wait.

She’s dizzy. Has to anchor a gloved hand against the wall of ice in front of her to be sure she isn’t moving.

Carolina drags fingers over the back of her neck. It burns, not quite numbed by the cold. No blood on her glove, though. Cold must’ve stopped it there.

There’s a smear of blood still wet, though, when she rubs her forehead. Not much. Not enough to worry about now. Remembers the line catching, swinging her in toward the wall of ice. Must've smacked her head pretty head.

She’s hanging suspended against the ice, far above—she looks down, her head throbbing with the effort. Black water and ragged ice floes. A long way down. Lot farther down than up. If she dropped fully suited, she’d survive. Long as the seal was intact. She would sink, the armor’s emergency flotation device would activate, she'd rise to the surface. She could swim to shore, find a way up.

Without her helmet—her head wet, her hair and skin would freeze quick. She wouldn’t have long.

Have to get her helmet back, and that means up.

Carolina flexes her hands, cracking her knuckles, and braces her feet against the ice, angling her body out from the wall. Gives the ascender trigger a gentle squeeze, feels the tug. The line holds.

She rises slow and steady, walking her way up the ice. It’s rough enough to give a little traction. Got to watch out for the smooth spots. She comes to a stop a couple of meters below where the claw is caught, sunk into an uneven jut of ice. It’s not enough to stand on. Enough to grip with one hand, maybe. Not for long.

Only got one grappler. She has to unhook and re-anchor to get higher. Have to get back to the top for her helmet. _Think._

Her time with the AIs was so short, but she’d already become used to reaching for them, for the little cool blue tug of Eta’s call, the faint yellow flicker of response. What they left was enough to catch her. Keep her alive. There’s nothing else left. This is all her.

 

In the field, there’s a wall you put up in your mind.

It’s not like you don’t feel anything. You feel a lot of things out there in the heat of battle, in the blood and smoke, the stench of death leaking through your air filter, the screams in your helmet radio, all the noise. You have to filter the noise, or you can’t hear what’s important. The teammate yelling for backup over the roar of gunfire. The hiss of a sticky grenade with its faint trail of blue smoke through the air. Memories, maybe, that new squaddie that didn’t listen hard enough, took one to the back of the head, splattered red and blue over your left side, their brains powerwashed off your armor plating before the next mission.

You feel a lot of things. You just establish a perimeter around it and you lock it down.

 

She draws in a ragged breath.

Okay. What’s she got. Grappling gun, 50 meters of cable, the three-prong hook, one spare carabiner. Superheated plasma would do pretty good for cutting some handholds in the ice, but of course, her plasma rifles are gone. The elevator shaft. God damn it, York. If he ends up the reason she freezes to death dangling in midair—

She still has her sidearm, though, and a full magazine, which should come in handy later. Projectile fire into the ice, though, is too risky. Save the bullets.

What else? Her armor contains an emergency medical kit, emergency field ration. She has a multitool, and her M11 combat knife.

Carolina unsheathes the knife from its slot. Carefully. She drops anything, there’s no getting it back. Only get one shot at this.

She looks up, surveying the icy cliff overhead. The sky’s gray-white, painful to stare at even without snow. The overhang offers enough shadow to hide the sun. She realizes, with a jolt, that she has no idea how much time has passed since the crash. It’ll get dark—actually, maybe it won’t, come to think of it, if they’re close to the pole. She remembers the image of sprawling white polar caps coming up fast under her feet, the viewscreen spidercracking beneath them as she moved to dodge Tex’s blows.

The gleam of Maine’s helmet haloed in the sun through falling snow, the curve of his scalp under her palm in dim light.

Twin screams.

Lock it down.

 

The ice juts out at the top, with a significant overhang. Impossible to climb straight up the wall. Gotta hook that edge and get over it. She’ll swing out over the water and have to free-ascend. And if the fragile ice at the edge of the overhang gives, she’s done.

Overhead, the ice juts a long way out. To her left, the overhang is less severe. She can get over.

She settles the knife in her hand, getting a good grip. Squeezes the ascender, rising.

 

The spot where the hook has caught is not as secure as she’d like. Hoped for a deeper fissure. As it is, it’ll take some work. She’s got force amps, but there’s a danger of too much force. If the hook gives and she doesn’t have a grip, she goes down.

The knife needs to hold her full, armored weight, long enough for her to fire the grappler and secure a new hold above. Her rig’s basic, no cams. Made for work in cities, space stations, human-populated areas. Not for this. She has one spare carabiner. No spare line. Her hand and the knife are really the best bet here. She only has to hold herself long enough to make the shot.

She takes a deep breath, steadies herself before drawing back carefully and jamming the knife into the ice. Not too close to where the hook is anchored. It takes a few tries to get a deep enough hold.

Eta and Iota would help a lot here. Calculate the distance, angle, wind speed, compensate for gravity, modulate the gel layer of her glove to bolster grip. They’re gone. She doesn’t even have a fucking HUD.

She gives the knife one final jam into the ice. Buried almost to the handle, angled out and slightly upward. Enough to hold her. Enough that the serrated edge should hold and not slide out.

She hopes.

Carolina wraps her hand around the knife hilt, takes a slow breath, and looks up again, squinting, to find her target spot. A bit to her left, she’ll swing hard, but there’s less overhang that way, the ice will be more solid. She’ll ascend fast. Get up and over the edge.

She squeezes the release trigger on her grappler, feels the line go slack, her right arm taking her weight.

Flick of her wrist, the hook comes loose. Reel the line back in. Up. Aim. Breathe. Fire. Cable sails into the white air. She jerks her hand inward, watches the line whip toward the ice, up and up and up. She can make out a puff of snow rising where it makes contact, bits of ice and snow falling, and her shoulder aches and her elbow aches and her fingers cramp with the tension of her grip, even with the gel layer in her gloves helping to compensate, and she bites in another frosty breath, squeezes the trigger and the slack goes out of the line and the hook doesn’t fall and the line tightens until she can feel it pull against her, and the hook holds.

She pulls it tighter, to be sure, and she sways as the line pulls her with it, and the hook holds.

Carolina grips the knife, walks her boots up the ice and kicks away hard, once, twice, three times and the M11 comes loose with a scrape against the ice, and she swings, rising as fast as the ascender will carry her, tears streaming from her eyes stinging in the cold, freezing on her skin. She gasps, an icy breath forced into her lungs and for a few seconds she feels weightless, flying, the lightest she’s felt in days and weeks and as she swings back the other way, the edge of the overhang comes up fast, clumps of snow and ice still flaking down, and Carolina huffs her breath out in a shout of triumph as she swings her right arm up over the edge and jams her combat knife into the ground.

She takes a second to inhale before hauling herself up and over. The grappling hook held. It was a good shot. She did good.

She made it.

She’s alive.

 

She is so, so tired.

A tickle on her face draws her attention and when she swipes a glove across her forehead, it comes back bloody. That crack to the head must’ve opened up again. 

Gotta find her helmet.

She presses both gloved hands to her face, trying to wipe away any moisture. The tear-streaks are already burning in the cold.

She struggles to her feet, every muscle protesting—she has to stop on one knee, put her head down to stop everything from swimming. One foot in the snow. The other. _Come on, Carolina._ She’s up. Move.

The snow’s deep, slowing her steps. More fresh snow than she realized. Must’ve been out a while. Her helmet will be buried. If it’s here at all. It has to be.

She kicks the fresh powder to one side and the other, and her foot knocks something and a flash of aquamarine shows through the white. Right here.

(Right where Maine dropped it.)

She shakes the snow out of it, brushes out the inside. Her hair’s a disaster, matted and messy, but she just tugs out her ponytail and reties it quickly. Hisses as the cold interior of the helmet settles over her ears and her face, but it’ll warm up quick. Rolls down the mesh over her neck (it stings at the nape) to where it meets the undersuit, seals it up

Blinks.

Her HUD lights up before her eyes, and relief floods through her like the warmth of her fully functioning suit. Vitals, analytics, scroll before her eyes.

TARGET LOST

She’s alive.

The _Invention_ lies just ahead, gashed into the snow like some kind of giant blade. Somewhere beneath the broken hull, a light flickers.

TARGET LOST

Her fingers curl into fists, warm inside her gloves. The knuckles of her right hand crack. She breathes, and it doesn’t burn now.

(She remembers the ragged growl of his breath, the way his scars would ripple with the motion of it.)

Lock it down, Carolina.

The mission isn’t over yet.


	3. Snow Blind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to past Carolina/Niner and past Carolina/Maine. Includes non-explicit sexual content.

 It’s been seventy-six hours and nineteen minutes since she started her mission clock running on the bridge.

_“Carolina, you know what needs to be done.”_

_“I do.”_

_“Then do it.”_

Sync, she said to herself, and started the clock.

A solo mission. What they’d been training for all along, really. What _Tex_ had already been doing—placed at the top from the start, a position she’d never had to earn. She hadn’t worked her ass off, month after month, through orientation and team building and sim training and the missions against the insurrection. _Carolina_ didn’t make squad leader just by hitting hard or running fast or even having the highest combat scores—though she _did_ have the highest combat scores. But being first doesn’t make you a leader. Not if you leave your team behind.

She thinks of York, her infiltrator. Wash, her combat engineer. The Dakotas, her stealth specialists. Wyoming and Florida, her recon team. And Maine…

Seventy-six hours in the snow. Her perimeter is faltering.

 

The trail is cold. There is no trail. Tex had a head start on her by hours, and heavy snowfall to cover her tracks. The residual heat signature left behind isn’t hers.

Tex, Carolina is sure now, doesn’t run hot. Not like a human. Not like a _person_.

The heat signature was left by a person, someone with a lot of mass. Her heavy.

Maine.

 

But thinking of Maine sends her spiraling, a storm of horror and confusion she can’t see her way out of. Something _happened_ to him. Something happened she can’t understand, _should_ understand but she missed it. Something happened to him and it all happened while she wasn’t looking.

When did she start feeling out of sync with everything that was going on around her? On the freeway, maybe, when she rolled under the bus, slammed up and down between the pavement and the underside of the vehicle until her teeth rattled and her ribs ached and she came tumbling out and smashed facefirst into a wall. Chest on fire as she struggled for her breath, HUD flashing _HELMET SEAL COMPROMISED_ and she looked up tasting blood in her mouth with her hair whipping into her eyes, and Texas had the briefcase.

Half a step too slow.

_Better luck next time, Carolina._

She _knew_ she could make that run if she could just rewind, roll back ten seconds, one do-over, run it again.

But there are no do-overs in the field. No do-overs for 110 stories collapsing to dust and rubble behind you, no rewind for Connie with an axe to the chest. No chance to pull Tex back, the monster in black, the ghost who followed them in the shadows and destroyed everything in her path and never missed her targets. No second chances. You’re already dead.

Cadets don’t get that barked in their faces hundreds of times for nothing.

Maybe it was even before that, watching that grenade roll toward York’s face.

She’s been falling since Texas showed up. Half a step behind and then a full step and then two steps, and now

now she’s circling in the snow, no trail to follow, nothing, and Maine—

wherever he is, she lost him a dozen steps ago.

She should have _known_ and she doesn’t know _what_ she should have known or _how_

but it’s there like a flash in your peripheral vision, like the killing blow you only see too late.

 

The heat signature led her south from the crash, through the mountains, opened into a valley, and that’s when she realized—she knew this planet. She knew where they’d crashed. Not why.

A remote, uninhabited planet, smaller than Mars, with a variety of biomes over its largest continent, with enough environmental variation for an array of simulation outposts.

This was Sidewinder. A U-shaped valley in the ice and snow, bases built into either rocky end of the U. Red to the west. Blue to the east. She turned east.

 

Dead Blues.

Five dead Blues in the snow, not much sign of struggle on the first three. Quick, silent kills. Like a shadow. Like someone who’d kill simulation troopers for no reason. Poor saps.

Inside Blue Base, overturned supply crates and MRE packets spilled across the floor. A cold silence, the scrape of footsteps on frosty concrete echoing off the walls.

On the upper level: a teleporter. Not unusual. Quick way to move between training bases without sending a bird down. Some outposts had multiple teleporters, allowing for traps and ambushes. This one flickers and sputters, blackened by what looks to have been a sticky grenade.

Someone had left who didn’t want to be followed.

So there was nowhere to go, but back into the canyon, in the snow.

 

There were Reds left alive. Spying on her from the tunnel through the middle of the U with their cheap sniper rifle. She climbed up, shook them down—two of them, practically pissing themselves terrified and she knew they were telling the truth, what they could tell her. Two Freelancers went into Blue Base, one blue and one black. Black one left a trail of bodies behind. No one came out.

 

Her HUD remembers the outposts, pinpoints on her map. They were never given a full map during training, only diagrams of the outposts themselves, not their positions relative to each other. Automapping has filled in some of the gaps. There are at least a hundred points, when she zooms out and out and out. Still staffed by their color-coded sim troopers, she supposes, vigilant inside their cheap concrete shells. What’ve they been doing all this time, while the _Invention_ jumped to other systems, while they clashed with Insurrectionists and secured intel and resources and prepared for their eventual deployment behind Covenant lines—watching, waiting, taking potshots at each other across their canyons?

Zoomed out, they make a map of stars on the dark background of her HUD. Zoomed in—the nearest one is still days away in the snow. Map points blurring before her eyes, until she almost forgets what she’s looking for in the first place.

Back out into the snow. Look long. Eyes on the horizon, scanning for black on white.

There are mountains in the distance, the skyline jagged with them, but she can’t discern their shapes one from another any more. They all look the same, peaks and valleys melting into the white sky, and she can’t feel sure if she headed for one that she’d ever reach it. Like Alice gone through the looking glass. She might end up turned around and going the other way, chasing the wrong peak, but all the same untouchable, blinding white.

 

She used to wonder what the recruit’s face looked like, always helmeted, never unsuiting in the locker room. You get to think of people by their helmets, their colors—Wash’s yellow accents, Connie’s heavy angles, Maine’s gleaming gold—but even then they have faces. Even Wash and Maine, who both wore their armor like it was their own skin, helmets included, showed their faces sometimes. Even Florida, whose record was so heavily redacted it might as well not have existed—even Florida had a face.

In her mind’s eye Tex _is_ that black helmet, and distorted on the gold visor her own face, screwed up with pain, falling to her knees helpless and still feeling that eyeless stare.

 _A shadow_ , CT called her. She shudders at the memory.

You can tell a monster in your nightmares, “You’re not real,” but what happens when it follows you out of the dream?

She sees the faceless visor up close when she closes her eyes, and it never recedes, and instead she sees herself shrinking to a blur in that black void.

She stares into the white, now, and remembers how Tex can disappear.

 

Her eyes burn.

The HUD dims the visor, light levels modulating as she squints and struggles to see the terrain ahead. They say you can blind yourself, traveling in arctic climates, if you stare into all that white unshielded. Even dimmed, it’s hard going, hard to see shapes or distances. Upping the contrast just makes everything whiter, mountaintops melting into sky.

Her head pounds mercilessly. She exhausted her supply of painkillers some thirty hours ago and the headache rages, stabbing from temples to bridge of nose to nape of neck and traveling down her spine.

Texas has eyes that will never get tired.

She can’t stop moving now.

 

A sliver appears, a cut in the snow ahead. She squints, the contrast faint enough that it might be a trick of the light. But as her steps bring her closet, the sliver widens. A canyon ahead. A curved, deep gash in the terrain.

What she should know needles at her, with each heavy step. Even before she gets close enough to see down, walks down the jut through the center of the U, just to be sure.

A long horseshoe, bases set into the rock at both of the southward-facing ends. Flashes of blue armor in the snow.

She doesn’t have a scream left in her. There’s no one around to hear it anyway. But she grits her teeth, clenches her jaw until it aches.

An updraft gusts up from the canyon, swirling snow around her, and her vision blurs. She doesn’t even know how it happened, whether she started looking at the wrong map point or got turned around between the mountains or stopped paying attention to the terrain altogether.

The trail is cold. There is no trail.

  

The rumble of a Pelican overhead doesn’t strike her as real.

She waits for it to recede, blur back into the white and the cold and the pounding in her head. Instead the rumble grows and with it a rush of air and heat that sends the temp reading on her HUD spiking.

Carolina unseals her helmet, tugs it off and the cold bites into her face instantly, sharp as a slap on both cheeks. The breath she sucks in aches bitter in her lungs. The headache pinches to a stabbing point between her eyes.

But the Pelican is real, hot and black, the snow pitting and then melting beneath it as it sinks to the ground.

She squints, eyes aching, breath clouding in front of her face.

There’s a familiar white helmet in the cockpit, and the front hatch opens and a petite figure outfitted in white and gray jumps out into the snow.

 

“Oh my god,” Niner says on speaker, practically yelling over the howl of the wind. “Put your damn helmet on. It’s freezing out here. Fuck, did you hit your head? Carolina, jesus. It’s me, all right? It’s _me_.”

She fumbles her helmet back over her face, sees the ping on COM. A request to speak on an encrypted channel. She accepts the request.

Niner has a hand on her back, the other on her arm, inexplicably pulling. “C’mon, hon.”

“What? No.”

Her voice sounds cold in her own head, far away.

“What do you mean, _no?_ ”

Gravel in her throat. She hasn’t heard her own voice speaking in days.

“I haven’t _completed_ the _objective._ ” Shame rising, a bitter taste in her throat.

Haven’t found her yet. Seventy-six hours. Three days.

“What _objective_ —”

“I haven’t _found her._ ”

“Found who?”

“Texas!” She wants to scream, tear off her helmet and let her voice cut through the snow and endless white, let it pierce the silent gray-white sky open, “God damn it, Texas! She’s still out here, I have to—”

“Lina—”

Yanks her arm away from Niner, fury burning in her chest. “I’m not going back with _nothing!_ I’m not failing another mission—”

“Oh my god,” says Niner, angry now too. White light glancing off her blue visor as she cocks her head. “ _Carolina_. There is no objective, she’s _gone._ ”

 _“No,”_ she growls desperately, trying to hear herself over the howling of the wind, over the howling in her own head.

“ _Listen_ to me,” Niner growls back. “There is no objective. There is no mission. They didn’t _send_ me, Carolina, no one sent me, the roster has you KIA. There is no one and nothing except me and my god damned bird and you are getting in and we are _leaving_.”

Carolina bites her lip until she tastes blood, and nothing she wants to scream comes out.

_no one sent me_

She sways, as spots of white appear in her vision.

_there is no mission_

The world stops moving.

 

She doesn’t entirely remember getting in the Pelican. Maybe Niner’s arm linked with hers, all but dragging her up the ramp at the rear. Maybe boots on the ramp. Maybe collapsing into a crash seat, feeling her legs give out from under her, wondering vaguely why that hadn’t happened already.

“Helmet off,” Niner says as the hatch hisses closed.

Hand on the back of her neck to release the seal, the HUD blinking its standard _WARNING ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS UNSUITABLE_ before it lifts away.

God, her head hurts.

Niner’s hand comes up and carefully brushes her hair off her her forehead, still goose-egged from the crack on the ice. Carolina winces.

“You look like shit,” Niner says, more gently. “Lemme get the med kit.”

“I‘m fine.”

“Like hell you are.” Niner disappears into the cockpit, returns with the kit. Then she’s bending over Carolina again, and there’s a cool swipe of something over her forehead. Light but it still hurts. She swallows and swallows again and holds her jaw tight. Niner’s hand comes away with a disinfectant wipe, a dark red smear on it.

She stares at Carolina for a long moment, then digs out a plain dry tissue and swipes it across one cheek, then the other, dabs under her eyes. Takes a minute to figure out what she’s doing. Guess her face is wet. Eyes watering. She licks her lips, tastes salt.

Moments later there’s a canteen in her hand. She drinks. The water’s lukewarm, not cold. Feels good on her throat. She spills a little down her chin, wipes it away hastily with a clumsy hand.

Niner’s close to her face again, staring her her intently.

“What are you—”

“Shh. I’m checking your pupils.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah. You’ve clearly had a fucking concussion. Traumatic brain injury. But sure, you’re fine.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Bet you’ve got a bitch of a headache.”

“Yeah.”

“You use up all your painkillers?”

“Yeah.” Carolina lets out a shaky breath. "Yesterday."

Niner shakes her head, moves back to the cockpit. “Well, at least you know what day it is. That’s good. I’ll get you something for that. Can’t give you the hard stuff after a head injury, but here…”

She comes back with the pills and Carolina swallows them, washing them down with gulps of water until Niner tugs on her arm and pulls the canteen away. “Don’t drink too fast. Gonna make yourself puke.” She has a cold compress in her hands, cracking it to set off the chemical reaction. “Here. You can put this on that softball you got on your forehead, at least.”

It takes so much effort just to hold her arm up to keep it in place. Carolina props her elbow on the crash bar, leaning back against the seat.

Things come into focus, a little.

“You flew without authorization.”

Niner snorts. “No shit.”

"What’s gonna happen when the—” _The Director, roster has you KIA, no one sent me_ — “when they find out?”

“That assumes they find out.”

“They’ll review the flight logs.”

“Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me.” Niner’s back in the cockpit. Through the open door Carolina can see her kneeling by her seat, fiddling with something beneath the console. “Gimme a sec with this and then we’ll be out of here.”

Carolina shivers.

“They’ll know you flew.”

“Yeah. Probably ground me and stick me behind a desk."

Carolina feels hollow. Like someone punched her in the chest, yesterday or the day before that. Like her insides haven’t settled back to where they belong. Like there are pieces missing.

"Lace," Carolina says, thickly, and her own tongue feels heavy in her mouth. What she wants to say is _No_ , what she wants to say is, _You can’t,_ what she wants to say is _You’re supposed to fly, you’re supposed to be out there flying circles around every other pilot in the fleet, goddamn it Lacey you can’t throw it all away on me I’m not worth it you can’t._

She chokes, all the words stopping before they reach her mouth, face hot and throat tight like she might cry, if crying was something she did.

Through the door she sees Niner shrug.

“You didn’t have to—”

“Of course I didn’t.” There’s a snapping noise from up front. Niner comes back with something in her hand. “I’m gonna get us rolling. Chuck this out the back, would you? Then c’mon up front.”

Niner eyes her as she stands, letting her get steady before handing off the device. The in-flight data recorder, ripped out of the console. She’s seen them before but never held one. It’s heavier than you think, all encased in carbon nanofiber, bright orange and black stripes. You could break it, maybe, with a lot of force. More than her force amps can put out.

She steps to the back of the bird, throws the thing out the back, over the edge and down into the canyon. There’s no sound, no sight of it in the deep snow, no sign that it landed at all.

The hatch drops before her eyes, shutting out the cold and the canyon and the endless white.

“Carolina.” The engines rumble, thrusters engaging. “C’mon up here. We gotta go.”

 

Her head swims for a minute as she climbs up in the copilot seat, but it feels weirdly good to be up here. No one was allowed to fly shotgun on Vehicle 479er. No one but her. She wasn’t the only one on Alpha Squad with flight cert, but the only one Niner would approve to sit in her cockpit. Niner took her out for her version of a “field test,” a wildly nonreg thrillride through a handpicked asteroid field that would’ve gotten most seasoned Flight Officers banged up, never mind whatever unsuspecting jarhead was lucky enough to be strapped in behind.

They finished breathless with whoops and laughter and adrenaline and Niner’s mouth between Carolina’s thighs, parked just out of view of the _Invention_ while they broke armor protocol. “Name’s Lacey, by the way,” the pilot said, winking smugly as she sunk to her knees. “Keep it to yourself on the ship. Feel free to scream it out here, though.”

She did.

That happened a few times during training. Nothing exclusive. Suited both of them fine. _“And this bird you cannot cha-ee-a-ee-a-ee-a-ee-ange,”_ Niner would warble gleefully, draped half-unsuited over Carolina on the cockpit floor, until Carolina threatened to space her.

 

“I don’t need you for flying,” Niner says as they roar into the atmosphere, “but I want to keep an eye on you. When’d you last eat? I got protein bars.”

It occurs to Carolina that some of the hollow feeling in her gut might be attributable to hunger.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, you’ve eaten, or yeah, you’re hungry? Whatever, you should eat anyway. Lemme get us out of the burn here and I’ll toss you one.”

Carolina sinks into her seat, lets the Gs press down on her. Closes her eyes.

 

She drifts, but doesn’t sleep, and the roar eases and then melts away down to the low rumble of the engines as Niner pulls them into high orbit. She reaches under her seat, digging out a full pack of protein bars. Peanut butter flavor. Tosses them up to Carolina, who catches the pack and tears a bar out like a person famished—which, maybe she is, she doesn’t really remember. The pain and the cold and the hunger have drowned each other out in intervals, one at a time dominating her attention, and she knows she ate some field rations over the past seventy-six hours but she can’t really remember when or how much.

Her head still throbs, and there’s a brief wave of nausea as she takes the first bite and starts to chew mechanically. But her stomach rumbles even as she swallows, and Carolina wolfs down the rest of the bar without much more thought and tears open another.

 

She doesn’t think much for a while.

“You’re not taking me back to the ship,” she says, finally. It’s half a statement, half a question, and it’s been in the back of her head ever since they broke atmo, but. Well. Eating seemed more important.

“Nope,” Niner says. That’s a statement. No question in it.

“So I’m AWOL.”

“No, _I’m_ AWOL. You’re dead, remember?”

“I’m not dead,” Carolina points out. It’s about the most insightful statement she can muster right now.

“Yeah, and I’m aiming to keep it that way.”

“I can’t just—”

“Carolina, I realize this is a conversation we’re gonna need to have, but you also need to realize that I pretty much made up my mind about this before I left the hangar. Look, you’re kinda fucked up right now, and I get that, and you’re probably not thinking real clearly, so let me give you my view of what shit’s been going down the past week.”

“Lace—”

“Your squad is like… oh for eight right now, you realize that, right? Texas isn’t the only one who went rogue, we lost the twins, and York—”

She draws in a sharp breath with a hiss.

“—and Wash is either dead or behind like nine levels of security clearance and Wyoming’s been in medical for the past week which means that on the curve, he’s doing pretty good. Maine is—” Niner stops, and Carolina almost stops breathing. “Well, I don’t know about Maine. There’ve been a lot of rumors but no one really knows—”

Her chest feels so tight she thinks she might implode.

“You and him were still…?” Niner throws a glance over her shoulder. “Sorry. You don’t have to tell me. I just…”

If she throws up in Niner’s cockpit maybe Niner will stop talking.

“Like hell I’m taking you back there.” Niner’s voice has gone low and tight and angry. “Like _hell_. I’ve only got half a plan here but like _fuck_ , Carolina. I know you’re gonna be pissed at me and I don’t care. I don’t care if you hate me for this, I’m not taking you back there so you can get brainfucked by some computer program or—”

She stops abruptly and exhales.

“I’m not.”

Carolina says nothing.

She stares out into the black, stares and stares until her vision blurs, and thinks maybe if she stares hard enough it’ll just swallow her whole.

 

“We gotta park for a while.” Niner rises from her seat, and Carolina realizes the Pelican’s come to a standstill. It’s been a while. Hours, probably. She’s had her helmet off so she hasn’t been keep track. “We’re out on the edge though. I put us in orbit around the double satellite. We’re way out of reach of the _Invention’s_ sensors even if they were functioning normally, which, they’re totally not. If I do get grounded, at least she’s grounded with me.” Niner snorts. “Way things are going, I’ll be lucky to jockey a radio anyway. Maybe get out ahead of the court martial I figure’s coming to this entire outfit.”

Carolina turns her head to the side to watch one of the rocky satellites drift into their view. Gray-brown, silvery patches, probably frozen water. The other probably the same. Like two moons without a planet. Just spinning around each other, out here on the edge of the system. Far from the sun, but still caught in its orbit.

“Just gotta wait for our ride,” Niner continues. “Might be a while, sorry. It’s not real far out of their way but you know how it is with jumps. Old favor I called in, she shouldn’t ask too many questions. Just make up some bullshit if she does. She won’t do anything with it anyway.”

“You’re not coming.”

Niner takes off her helmet. She’s powered down the lighting to standby, and the dim blue tint plays off her cheekbones, makes her eyes look especially dark. She sets her helmet on the console with a clunk, sighs. “You know I would for you, Mal, but.”

“I didn’t say for me.”

“Nah. I didn’t mean.” Niner breaks off, doesn’t finish. “I mean, I’d do it for me too, but.”

“But.”

“But you’re not the only one who likes to finish a job.”

Carolina turns to look her in the eye.

Niner meets her gaze, then looks away. She sighs, strips her gloves off and tugs the tie out of her thick black hair, shakes her curls out and smoothes them down again and back into a tight knot on the back of her head. “You’re not the only one still out there.”

“Just the first one you found.”

Niner steps closer to the copilot seat. Looks her dead in the eye again. “First one I looked for.”

Carolina swallows.

She thinks of herself saying, I could stay. Saying, I could help you find them. And it sounds like something someone else would say, someone who still felt like a person and not a black hole inside a suit of armor.

She says nothing.

Niner sighs and steps in close, hops up on the edge of the seat and starts taking down Carolina’s hair from what’s left of her ponytail, combing through the tangles with her fingers. Carolina stares out into space again, cognizant of nothing much beyond the tugs on her scalp, little points of feeling in the emptiness.

  

It’s a while, like Niner said. Carolina loses track of how long.

She keeps her helmet off, because if she puts it back on she knows what she’ll see. The mission clock still running, _TARGET LOST_ still flashing.

She sleeps instead, at first dozing in the copilot seat, then at Niner’s insistence lying down across the crash seats in the back.

Niner wakes her, makes her eat, makes her drink water. She wakes up with her head in Lacey’s lap once or twice and feels cool hands stroking her hair.

Niner asks her questions, cognition stuff, trying to keep her head level, she guesses. Like it matters now. _When’s your birthday? (April 9, 2522.) What year is it now? (2550.)_ She skips the rank and designation questions but Carolina still feels the rote answers forming on her lips, _My designation is Freelancer Special Operative Agent Carolina…_ She doesn’t ask her name, though she knows part of it. She doesn’t ask about Texas or the three days in the snow. And Carolina doesn’t talk, except to rattle back dates and numbers that don’t mean anything anymore.

 

The ship that pulls out of slipspace is small, barely larger than a prowler. Not military either. Medical, from the insignia. Niner’s up and moving, pulling her helmet on as she makes for the cockpit. The transmission comes almost immediately. “Pelican dropship, this is the _Well of Ishmael._ We were… passing through and picked up your distress signal. Do you copy?”

“Read you loud and clear, _Ishmael_. I have a passenger in need of medical attention.”

“Copy that, Pelican. We’ll clear you to board.”

“Copy. Which dock?”

The voice sounds amused. “Only got the one. And it’ll have to be manual. We’re not outfitted for dropships.”

“Right, of course. Manual docking protocols engaged, _Ishmael_. Approaching from starboard. Stand by.”

 

The _Well of Ishmael_ is a tiny medical support ship, barely big enough to house a Shaw-Fujikawa drive. They dock externally under the belly of the sleek little ship, and exit via the overhead hatch. Niner sends Carolina up the ladder first, staying close behind her. They unseal their suits, pass through decontamination and into the ship proper. Inside, everything’s very clean and bright and white and blue. The Chief Medical Officer meets them, crisply uniformed with civilian medical insignia, and she sizes them up with a brusque nod. A look passes between her and Niner. “Flight Officer.”

“Medical Officer.” Niner returns the nod.

“And your passenger?”

“If you could give her look over before she goes to cryo, I’d appreciate it. She’s had a head injury.”

“I see. How recently?”

“Couple days ago.”

“Affirmative. I’ll need a name for the logs. And a vehicle designation.”

Niner fishes a data chip out of her flight suit and hands it over. “This oughta do you. Didn’t have time to come up with much of a story, but this should cover your ass, at least.”

“Appreciated.”

“You’re headed straight back to _Angel_ , yeah?”

“Correct.” The Medical Officer’s reserved countenance twitches slightly, as though suppressing a smirk. “Should be able to avoid any awkward questions. It would be in no one’s best interests to make unreasonable demands of _Angel_ personnel, especially concerning any connections with classified military programs.”

Niner shrugs neutrally. “Yeah well, I wouldn’t know anything about any classified programs.”

“No more than any of us, I’m sure.”

Niner nods toward Carolina. “Can you give us two minutes? Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

 

“Mallory,” Niner says as soon as they’re alone.

Carolina looks at her and forces her eyes to focus. “Yeah.”

“They’re gonna take you to _Angel On My Shoulder_. You know, the mobile station—”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You can probably hang out there for a while. Recoup. Then go somewhere _really_ far away from here. Move somewhere nice. Somewhere with a beach.”

Nothing Niner’s saying really seems to make a lot of sense, but it’s obviously important to her so Carolina listens.

“Just… get out, okay? Be okay. Take care of yourself. I’m serious.”

She doesn’t answer.

“I’m gonna get my ass chewed for this. Probably lose my bird. You gotta promise me.”

“Lace—”

“You know what, I don’t care if you promise. I’m holding you to it anyway.” Niner takes a deep breath, lets it out. “I might not be able to be in touch for a while, but you have to be okay, or I swear to whatever gods still exist that I’ll find you wherever you are in the galaxy and I will kick your ass.”

Carolina manages a dull smile. “Good luck with that.”

“I mean it, Mallory.”

“Lace, I’m sorry.”

Niner sighs, rolls her eyes and rises on her toes, planting a kiss on Carolina’s mouth. It gets her attention, if nothing else, and Niner always did kiss good, even if she doesn’t have the presence of mind to do much more than blink before it’s over. “I don’t think that’s much to ask, huh? Just stay alive out there.”

“I’ll try.”

“No try. You fuckin’ do it.” She claps her hands on the Carolina’s shoulders, squeezes. “I gotta go.”

 

Carolina endures the next twenty minutes or so of prodding by the Chief Medical Officer, more questions, lights in her eyes. She recites dates and says _That’s classified_ to the rest and the Chief Medical Officer snorts and clears her for cryo.

Been a while since she went on ice. Doesn’t sound bad right now.

She lies back in the pod, feels the injection and the brief burning as it crawls into her veins and then the cold envelops her and everything goes white.


	4. Jane Doe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter Warnings:** PTSD, panic attack, mild dissociation, suicidal ideation and a near-attempt.
> 
> Mentions of past Carolina/Maine.
> 
> Thanks [Eclaire-de-lune](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RoyalHeather/pseuds/Eclaire-de-Lune) for the beta read! All remaining mistakes are mine.

_Angel_ is noisy.

She should be used to it. The mobile medical station isn’t even half the size of the _Invention._ But full of unfamiliar voices: doctors, nurses, medics, patients, crew, military and civilian personnel. And full of questions: what’s your name, where you from, where you going.

She’s supposed to have answers. A cover story at least, a fake name and a backstory and a destination. She can’t tell the truth, and she’s got nothing left to scrape together for a good lie. Not when just being conscious hurts.

So she says nothing.

 

The exam brings up words like _mild traumatic brain injury._ _Mutism, diminished affect. Potentially neurological, potentially trauma-related, cannot rule out either without medical history..._

Lights in her eyes: _pupils responsive_.

Shakes her head yes, no: _cognizant, aware…_

She thinks distantly that that’s weird, that something can be _mild_ and _traumatic_ at the same time.

 

“Is there anything I can call you?”

Carolina shakes her head.

Deep brown eyes regard her from behind cranberry-red box-frame glasses. A delicate gold chain hangs from the frames, lying against the white collar of the doctor’s coat. Long dark braids with a reddish tint are swirled up neatly on top of her head, and her nails are long and ornate, tapping when she touches her datapad. Her nametag reads _Dr. Inserra._

“Nothing at all?” Dr. Inserra says, more gently. “It doesn’t have to be your real name.”

Nothing comes to mind, so she shakes her head again.

 

Inserra knows from the armor she came in with that she’s military. Probably guessed from the nonreg build that she’s Special Ops, even before she scanned her IFF. Didn’t say she was going to scan it—really, have the station’s AI scan it—but Carolina knows she did. It’d be SOP for a mute patient, obviously military, with no name. She knows too that _All Freelancer personnel will receive a specialized upgrade to your standard neural interface, enabling the use of powered combat armor with an onboard AI. Once you have received this upgrade, your friend-or-foe tag will still register with all UNSC personnel, but identification information including name, ID number, rank, unit, and designation will be unavailable to anyone lacking Project Freelancer Level One clearance..._

“Ah,” is all Dr. Inserra says from the console. She doesn’t ask any more questions, and Carolina volunteers nothing.

 

Inserra lines her up for a brain scan the next morning and a psych eval in the afternoon, has her admitted and given a bed, orders rest and fluids and a 30-day TBI watch.

30 days, and then—

Her mind goes as far as the edge of the allotted time period, and stops.

She goes for the scan, skips the psych. Waits to see if anyone comes after her about it. No one does. She’s not surprised. It’s a busy station. There are patients who matter.

 

The cafeteria runs on a 24-hour rotation, six hot meals a day at 4-hour intervals like they had on staggered sliptime. There’s a cold table with bread and peanut butter and other things that’s available all the time and that’s what she eats, mostly, for the first few days. Hard not to think of it as _the mess_ , but it’s not. _Angel_ ’s under contract to the UNSC, but it’s a civilian medical station. Carolina’s never been aboard, but seen them in orbit during training, parked in outer Sanguinus on call for simulation training incidents.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of those incidents.

(The Director disliked the word _accident_. It suggested—incorrectly—that no one was at fault.)

She goes in between meals when it’s quiet, eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a corner table, keeps her head down.

 

In the long atrium that runs the full length of the station, the television monitors are always running, muted with captions scrolling along the bottom of the screen as the faces of news anchors move silently above, opening and closing their mouths like fish in a tank. Carolina goes up there a lot. Not much else to do. It’s hard to focus for very long, though, hard to keep staring at the same screen and all the scrolling words without her vision blurring, her head swimming, feeling a little sick. She looks away, stares out the long viewscreens on either side that give the impression of windows, looking out on the vast stretch of dark scattered with pinpoints of light.

They’re parked out at the edge of the Morias system. All its habitable planets were glassed and abandoned more than a decade ago. Now an exit point for ships coming out of slipspace following direct contact with Covenant. Far from Earth, the Inner Colonies, anything Covies would want. Safe, distant, dead.

She looks back up at the monitors.

Keeps half-expecting to see something familiar—a name, a face, rogue operatives, a missing ship. Of course there’s nothing. Everything about their program was classified right down to their real names. They weren’t even supposed to tell each other, though the lower squads used to be sloppier about that. Why she knows Wash’s name. Was her only misgiving about him coming up to Alpha—he was too friendly, he’d be eaten alive—but his combat scores spoke for themselves. And he got along with South (though maybe just because she was tight with Connie) and after all, if a person could handle themselves with South…

She never knew CT’s name. CT was cagey even on Beta squad, used _Connie_ easy like it was her real name, maybe some people even thought it was.

Thinking about Connie makes her chest hurt, so she stops.

Carolina shifts in her seat, pulling her feet up under her. She’s in her undersuit, only thing she has to her name, so she walks around in that, her hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, aqua plating stashed in the little cabinet that comes with her 30-day bed.

On the closest monitor the scrolling headline is another glassed planet.

Most of the lower squaddies, the ones who didn’t make it up to at least Beta, ended up washouts, or—

—or training accidents, actually. Incidents. Alabama, Utah, Georgia. A lot more.

Or they just kind of disappeared.

There were those three from Delta Squad, back when the leaderboard had just gone up—Ohio, Idaho? One other she can’t remember. Used to hang out with Wash and Connie, back during training, but their combat scores were low and she never really payed much attention to them because it was obvious they weren’t going to make her squad.

Word was they dropped out. Went home, or back to Infantry, or wherever it was they came in from.

All of them just recruits who couldn’t hack it. Couldn’t compete.

She feels the drop in her stomach like she’s right back there again—like the first time she looked up at the board and saw in bright white on blue TEXAS in the number one spot, CAROLINA bumped to number two. YORK just below her, now at number three. Knew his name too, _Jason—_ he gave it to her the night they hooked up, before Freelancer, when he was just some easy Navy boy at a bar on Reach.

Her stomach clenches.

Another name hangs there, waiting to stop her breathing any second.

 

They didn’t even use real names. They knew them, but names weren’t the important thing.

Her hands are shaking. She’s stopped seeing the screen, stopped seeing the stars, only snow and white and her mind screaming _Lock it down, lock it down_ and she can’t. She can’t. She _can’t._

His name, his face comes out of the black like radio static, coming at her with heavy footsteps too fast and wrong and no time to think and a hand around her throat, something that can find her anywhere she goes and the atrium is gone, Morias is gone, she can’t breathe and her mind stops working.

She curls up into a ball in her seat, hyperventilates into the black mesh over her knees and clenches her fists and feels sweat on the back of her neck and everything around her moves very fast, all the noise and motion and people of _Angel_ around her keeps spinning.

 

When she manages to slow her breathing down and stop shaking, mostly, she uncurls herself from her chair in the atrium and goes up to the observation deck. No news monitors there, just space. Easier to stare and stare and let her mind go blank.

Thousands of stars, each a sun with its own worlds spinning—how many of them now burned to glass or Covenant-occupied. She looks between the stars instead, lets the points of light blur, focusing on the black. The stars are far, she thinks, but the blackest point of space is even farther.

It works, for a little while.

She’s already drained from the panic, and in the tired haze that follows, her mind goes blank, for a little while. The observation deck is quiet, few people, nothing happening. Even the room itself is arranged for quiet, all the seats facing the viewscreens and not each other. You can forget everything going on down below. Make everything stop for a while.

Isn’t that what she wanted?

 

She didn’t want to die. God damn it, she never wanted to die.

Just for everything to slow down, just to catch _up_ with what was getting away from her, slamming into her like a bus on the freeway. Eating her alive. Like the momentum you can’t stop, like what kills you when the pipeline breaks, the signal lost, _CONNECTION INTERRUPTED_ and you go careening wildly at inhuman speed into the nearest immovable object.

Like the rumble beneath her feet and the ground falling out from under her.

Like what happened to George Alabama Utah and she can’t go through the whole list of names again she can’t she can’t.

She just wanted it all to _stop._

She still does.

 

By day 3, she knows all the deck numbers. By day 4, the section names. _Angel_ ’s so much smaller than the _Invention._ Only so many places you can go. The station is three-pronged, three sections connected at their central atriums by long walkways lined with viewscreens. Up and down from each atrium, decks and decks—medical above, operations below, each spire threaded through the center by the long elevators. Through the upper decks, the elevator shaft is transparent, showing deck after deck full of white-clad medical staff, patients, military personnel in green or black, or dress blues. A vortex of activity and motion, the moving compartment sliding quietly through, like traversing the eye of a storm.

She walks, when she can’t stand sitting still anymore. Makes the circuit down all three atriums and back, rides the elevators up as far as they’ll go, and down.

Every day a fresh influx of people, ships docking and ships pulling back into slipspace. On upper C, you can sometimes hear the rumble of freighters, and the big shipping containers locking into the cargo docks.

Too many faces to stick, no one to recognize her, no one noticing her long enough to ask her name.

 

But Dr. Inserra remembers her.

Carolina goes for her one-week check-in. Answers the questions with nods, head shakes. Doesn’t meet the doctor’s deep brown eyes, even though the doctor’s nod of recognition when she steps into the exam room makes her want to turn and walk right back out again.

“I want to make sure you know,” Dr. Inserra says, as they’re wrapping up, “that the walk-in counseling center on A-4 is staffed twenty-four hours.”

Carolina looks away, her left foot jiggling with a sudden nervous energy.

“I have no grounds to force you to seek mental health care,” Inserra says, her elegant fingernails paused over the surface on her datapad. “And I’d rather not force you, to be frank. But I hope you’ll take it under consideration. There’s no shame in a combat veteran seeking help for whatever you’re dealing with.”

Combat veteran. She bites back a joyless laugh that becomes a grimace before she can rearrange her features back to neutral. She can feel the doctor’s eyes on her, behind her red-rimmed glasses.

Mechanically, she nods, because it’s what she’s supposed to do.

“Okay,” Inserra says quietly. “You can go.”

 

There’s no reason for the rush of medical personnel across the lobby of A-2 to catch her eye, no reason for her to stop short of the elevator back up to the atrium. Another ship out of slipspace, nothing new. A fast-running dropship bringing in critical patients ahead of the slower-moving destroyer, also nothing new. A motionless Marine on a gurney, still with the pale sheen of recent cryo on his skin—

The mass of white-suited staff surrounding the gurney moves quickly, as a unit, and Carolina follows like in a dream.

 

There’s a balcony over the zero-g operating room, windowed all the way around. There was one like it on the _Invention_ —docs called it _the fishbowl_. Full visual on the patient—body armor soaked in blood, wet and gleaming under the harsh lights, fresh like he’s still bleeding, they must have put him straight on ice off the battlefield to keep him alive—

She puts both hands to the reinforced glass, they’re tearing off his body armor, cutting through his BDU, the flesh beneath red and black and wet and a mess of ugly plasma wounds. She hears the call for drugs of some kind. The Marine only faintly groans. She watches as a nurse slides a needle into his arm and her chest tightens, _thank god he’s out, he hates needles so much, “How long has he been in surgery—” “We’re doing everything we can for him, Agent Carolina—” “How_ long—”

“You can’t be up here.”

She stares at the whitesuit with a hand on her forearm.

“Sorry,” the medic says, “you don’t have clearance.”

She lets herself be dragged away from the glass, because it’s not him, down the corridor and back through the sliding door she slipped through after the medical staff, unnoticed. She could shake the medic off in a fraction of a second. She could kill the medic without a weapon, without armor or force amps. She lets herself be walked her back toward elevator, because it isn’t him back there, covered in blood on the table, it isn’t him.

“You’re that Jane Doe the _Ishmael_ picked up,” the whitesuit says, “aren’t you?”

She doesn’t answer. It’s incredible how easy it is to get away with it, when you’re out of COC. They can’t do anything to her. They can’t make her talk. Can’t punish her with PT or KP or 2 AM drills. No one here has any real authority over her.

It’s wild, how it feels to just _refuse_.

“Inserra’s patient,” the medic says, prompting her. She stares dully and says nothing. “Special Ops, huh? Yeah, I know, it’s classified, trust me, I hear it every day. You know that guy?”

She chokes on what’s almost a laugh, and shakes her head.

“Look, I know you’re on a 30. It’s boring, I get it. Just stay out of the restricted areas, okay?”

The whitesuit is eyeing her with something like _pity_ now, and a rush of anger floods her suddenly, wondering, is this the real reason Inserra admitted her, why they’re letting her sleep and eat and wander around the station. Not because of a fucking concussion, she’s not even hurt, she’s _fine_. They just pity her. They _know_ , somehow, that she has nowhere to go.

She yanks her arm out of the medic’s grasp, and walks away.

 

For the next few days, she hangs out down by the docks.

She wears her armor down here. Would stand out too much without it, and in truth, it feels better to be helmeted again. Safer. Like no one’s looking at her, even if they are. She’s probably not supposed to be down here, either, but she stays out of the way, and no one says anything.

The docking level, like the atrium above, runs the full length of the station and connects the three sections, each with a docking bay to port and one to starboard. Instead of news broadcasts, the monitors show arrivals and departures. It’s noisy here too, but a different kind of noisy than upstairs. Full of voices and announcements and the sounds of airlocked doors opening and closing.

It is day 10. One third of her TBI watch used up, the days clicking down like spent rounds from a magazine. The dizziness, nausea, disorientation from her head injury are mostly gone—in their place just a hollow, detached feeling. Like she might be floating out in space already.

What happens when her days are all used up? When they kick her out of the bed they gave her, when she has nowhere to go, when she refuses to tell them who she is, what will they do with her? Put her on the next ship leaving the system? Put a call out for someone with high enough clearance to read her IFF? Throw her out the airlock?

She listens to the sounds of shuttles docking, the roar of engines powering down, the hiss and clunk of airlocks in motion, and thinks about that.

 

At either end of the long deck is a manual airlock.

Dropships and shuttles can dock in the small bays. The _Invention_ never docked at _Angel_ , just sent Pelicans. Sometimes, though, one of the destroyers or big battle cruisers will need to dock, usually for emergencies only. The airlocks can also go to mechanical control if the station’s power goes critical and the force fields in  the autodocking bays have to shut down.

The manual airlock is a three-meter-square box between two twenty-centimeter-thick steel doors. Each with a ten-by-twenty square of equally thick reinforced plexi, offering a peek out into the black.

Nothing fancy in here.

She pushes the first button, and the inner door closes behind her with a long groan and a clunk. She puts her hand on the solid steel. It’s colder in the box than in the corridor. Space is a lot colder yet.

She’d float for a while, while her oxygen reserves lasted. Get to breathe for a little while, looking at the stars. Then just pass out and sleep.

God, it sounds nice.

 

They’d find her drifting maybe, haul her in. That Jane Doe drop-off. No name, no identification. They’d send her down for cremation and be done with her. Clean and easy.

Except. They’d find her tags, still hidden inside her armor. The armor is probably traceable, somehow, back to Project Freelancer.

And then instead of KIA, she’d be a deserter.

A coward who went AWOL and then offed herself because she wasn’t good for anything, not even running away.

 

Carolina does not press the button to open the outer airlock door.

She screams instead.

She screams until her throat burns, until she tastes metal in her mouth, and then she pounds on the outer door, beats her hands against the steel until her palms ache inside her gloves and her knuckles chafe, half praying for the airlock to malfunction, for the door to open somehow under the force of her fists alone and throw her loose into space.

And then she screams some more until her voice is gone.

She sinks to the floor, back against the outer door, beating a few last half-hearted blows into the floor, catches her breath raw in her throat, and tears her helmet off, hurls it against the wall and covers her face with her hands, choking out one last hoarse gasp of a scream.

She’s still alive. And it doesn’t matter, because it’s all fucking gone. Everything, her family, her career, anyone she could call a friend, _all_ of it. Her entire life, blown out into space.

It just left her behind.

 

There’s a scuff on one side of her helmet where it hit the wall. Nothing worse. She catches a glimpse of her own reflection in the narrow gold visor—a smear of bleary eyes, dark-shadowed.

Her eyes focus on the visor, then the helmet as a whole, the aquamarine “face” that was hers as a Freelancer. As _Agent Carolina._

She rubs the back of her neck with one hand, then rolls the thick black collar of the undersuit part way down where it sits high around her throat. Slips her fingers between the mesh underlayer and her bare skin, feeling collarbone and pulse under her fingertips. Then metal, ball chain, warmed to her flesh. She pulls, feeling the slide of metal and the chain tugging lightly on her skin.

_Go somewhere far away from here._

She clenches her fist around the tags, tight enough to feel the edges cut in, before pulling the chain off over her head. The tags hit the floor with an echoey _clang,_ the chain with a softer _chink_. When she looks at her hand, the imprint of her last name, first name, middle initial, ID number and blood type is already fading from her palm.

She turns and slams her fist sideways into the button on the wall, and the inner door opens.

 

No one looks at her when she steps back into the long corridor, and door slides closed behind her, its heavy joints meeting with a scrape and thunk and sealing shut. No one looks up with more than a passing glance when the station AI trills, “ _Warning: exterior airlock door activated. Decompression in three… two…”_

Through the tiny window, she catches the quick gleam of steel as her name drifts out into the dark.


	5. Blank Space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter warnings** : PTSD, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, and a whole lot of self-hatred.
> 
> This chapter was originally written as part of [Zalia's](http://zalia.tumblr.com) Iron Gulch challenge, so those of you who follow me on tumblr may recognize most of the material, though it's been edited and expanded a bit here.

_My name is Mallory Allison-Church. My designation is Agent Carolina. My service number is—_

 

Ever since _Angel_ , she keeps waking clawing at her neck for the ball chain that isn’t there. Keeps tearing awake in a panic that feels like hands around her throat, wondering if something in her own damn head is trying to kill her, choke herself to death with her own hands. It’s not like it’d be a stretch.

It’s harder than she thought it would be, adjusting to being dead.

 

Leaving _Angel_ was easier than you’d think. She didn’t plan it really. Hadn’t been thinking _plan_ , hadn’t been thinking anything past those thirty days because beyond that was nothing but a blank space. Day 22, lurking down on the hangar deck watching the monitors, watching arrivals and departures. And like not talking, it turned out to be easy, singling out a civilian transport heading back to colony space. Boarding the shuttle with a cluster of homebound medics and troops headed back on leave. Not speaking. Pretending no one was eyeballing the bright shade of her armor, thinking briefly of her adaptive camo. Remembering it was gone.

Eight days before her TBI watch was up, before that brief thread of certainty could run out on its own.

The transport offered cryo for the slipspace jump, or accommodations, for an additional fee. One she could easily have afforded.

She took cryo.

Can’t think when you’re on ice.

 

When she jolts awake in the dead of night feeling hands around her neck that turn out to be her own, she slams her arms down at her sides, digs her hands into the hard mattress and tries her damnedest to get her breathing back to normal, if anything can be called normal now. Stares at the ceiling trying to focus on the matte synthetic texture of the ceiling over her head, faint as it is in the dark. Forces her body rigid, trying to freeze out the inexplicable terror exploding in her chest and traveling in electric tremors down through her limbs—like somehow, locking all of her muscles tight and gritting her jaw to keep from screaming is going to keep it all from getting out. Going to keep her from shattering into pieces she won’t be able to put back together. _Light as a feather, stiff as a board._ Maybe if she stays rigid enough she can float on the darkness, drift off to somewhere safer than sleep, safer even than being on ice.

Her mind spins and spins and none of it really makes sense but trying to slow it down is worse. Best case scenario she can zone out, try to go blank and think as few thoughts as possible.

_My MOS was the Special Operations branch of the UNSC Marine Corps and I held the rank of Captain prior to entering the special project designated FREELANCER. My designation is—_

Shut up shut up shut up shut up you’re nobody

you’re no one you’re no one you’re no one

 

You wouldn’t think that would be very comforting. It isn’t.

It’s just better than the alternative.

 

If she’s lucky she might be able to fall back asleep. Lucky. Better lucky than good. York used to say that and she always thought it was stupid. Luck was anybody’s game. Good was something you could depend on.

Now with good stripped away from her like her name and rank and her whole damn life, luck is all she’s got left.

It’s been a while she’s been lying here awake. Jittering, spinning, shaking her legs at intervals to get it out. Probably not as long as it feels like.

Carolina sucks in a deep breath. Rolls upright, shakes out her limbs. The tension lingers, settling in her joints, her shoulders, the ache in her neck that’s quickly becoming a pulsing headache.

She leans forward, lets her head rest in her hands, and groans softly. Putting very slight pressure on her temples and the hollows under her eyes relieves it a little. She doesn’t turn on the light. It still feels safer in the dark, which she knows is completely stupid. Nothing’s going to _get_ her, nothing’s coming for her.

No one’s coming for her. That’s the point, isn’t it! That’s the joke, Carolina! There was no mission and no one’s coming and _everyone thinks you’re dead, Carolina, the roster has you KIA._

You’re the joke, Carolina.

_My MOS is dead fucking useless failure that no one cared enough to come for anyway. Occupational Specialty: Failure, dead._

Not sure which one’s worse.

That’s not true. She knows exactly which one’s worse.

 

The water in this apartment (she can’t quite bring herself to call it hers yet) tastes metallic, leading her to wonder in the back of her head every time she chugs a cup of it whether she’s giving herself a slow case of heavy metal poisoning. She doesn’t really care enough to stop drinking it. On less bad days she congratulates herself for drinking enough water to keep her lips from cracking and her head from pounding.

Tonight, she sips the water slowly and chases away the headache by fantasizing about death from heavy metal poisoning. Not that she really knows much about that. Not sure if her imagination is romanticizing it into something less bad and painful, or dramatically more so.

The distraction does help with the headache, though. Or maybe that’s just the water.

She misses her quarters, of all things. The single was compact and private and perfect, the one place aboard ship she could truly relax. Let the tension out of her shoulders and her spine and everywhere it collected in her body through briefings and missions and classes and endless cycles of training. Behind a closed door she could stop being _Alpha Squad Leader_ , stop being Agent Carolina even, for a little while.

Same reason the dark feels safe now, maybe.

 

It’s gonna be a bad night, so she doesn’t go back to bed. Can sleep later. She hasn’t really figured out what to… do, with herself, particularly, during the day. Get a job like a normal person, maybe. It’s not an impractical thought. The funds she drained from her accounts onto untraceable credit chits won’t last forever. Might’ve been a stupid thing to do in the first place, what with the whole being dead thing, but if she’s going to stay alive for now she has to deal with that too. Anyway, identity theft happens. For missing or recently-KIA soldiers it’s not unheard of.

Get a job. Be a person. Be normal. Right. Normal people probably don’t collapse in on themselves in panic over the idea of going out in public during the day on the completely irrational fear that somebody’s going to see them and recognize them as an AWOL special operative and worthless fuckup.

Normal’s not really something she can think about right now.

She can think about living—eating, drinking, a cheap roof over her head, sleeping enough to avoid outright hallucinating. Alternately, she can think about dying, which she does a lot. It’s sort of a weird back-and-forth. Because in the bleak chasm of her brain, thinking about dying is weirdly soothing, but her body is still pretty adamant about stuff like eating and she’s always _liked_ eating and it does still make her feel better.

She can think about a few things. Making her thoughts make sense, she’s sort of given up on.

For now, she sits cross-legged on the floor of the apartment. (Okay, her apartment. She can think that. It’s hers, she lives here, in this little two-room dive on an unremarkable lunar colony in an as-yet-unglassed system and that’s not so scary. That’s not a panic thing.) She swallows the last of her water. Closes her eyes and thinks of the dark surrounding her and hiding her and sinks into that for a little bit, and for that little bit it’s okay. Her stomach rumbles a little, and she thinks about getting some crackers.

She has to open her eyes and move for that and the thinking’s going to start up again, there’s no way around that and it’s going to be not-okay again real quick. Crackers aren’t going to fix that. Water isn’t going to fix that. Fixes the bare-minimum living thing, that’s about it.

Occupational Specialty: Alive.

 _My name is_ shut up, it doesn’t matter.

She lets her breath out slowly, and gets up for the crackers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Allison is her last name" headcanon is compliments of [queseraawesome](http://archiveofourown.org/users/queseraawesome) who was kind enough to share.
> 
> For "Mallory," as always, I thank [Larissa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/larissa).

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this fic, I have a playlist for it! You can listen on [8tracks](http://8tracks.com/anneapocalypse/radio-silence) or on [Playmoss](https://playmoss.com/en/anneapocalypse/playlist/radio-silence-carolina-s-lost-years).


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